Went to ImagineNY training workshop last night. Coworker Vanessa and I were trained to be workshop facilitators in preparation for holding a workshop at the Commission. The purpose of ImagineNY workshops is to receive the feelings and ideas of ordinary people about what should happen to the World Trade Center. It's sponsored by the Municipal Arts Society of New York. You can see more about the project at www.imagineny.org.

It's a noble undertaking. However, I can see some limitations. The training took the form of a shortened workshop. Except for Vanessa and me (from New Jersey), the group was all from New York City. This meant that the focus was NYC, whereas our workshop at the Commission will have a completely different focus.

The idea is to start with our feelings about what happened, push through to what we would like to see come out of this, and wind up with specific proposals. However, that's not what happened last night. It may be because we did the workship in half the time with twice as many people, but the visions and strategies that came out of it were so general that create an image in your mind of what people intended.

For instance, our group which was to develop visions and strategies for "rebuilding and memorializing" discussed some very dynamic specifics. To give a little background into what the workgroups were doing: At one point in the workshop we made a list of some pretty specific ideas we would like to see. Each workgroup was supposed to select items from the list that related to our assignment and work with them until we had visions and strategies. From the list we chose: the need of a space at the WTC for contemplation; a place for people to grieve; to relate to the communities that lost individuals; meeting social needs of survivors; keeping development on a human scale.

From this our group envisioned a non-denominational chapel at the WTC site for contemplation and prayer where the public could grieve for all who were lost. However, at the site, you could take a card with the name of someone who died on 9/11 and find out the town where they lived. There would be travel directions to the town. The town itself would have a memorial for the person or persons who died in WTC. The approach would be for the memorials to be highly person and individual, so that people would have a sense of personal knowing. Accomplishing such a memorial would be a cooperative undertaking between business, government, communities, and people. The result would be the construction of a pilgrimmage that individuals could take to learn about New York, the World Trade Center, the people who worked and died there. It would also rejuvenate neighborhoods by encouraging visits from all over.

Now, how was this expressed. It was long a windy, talked about a linked memorial, but nowhere did you get the sense of a specific, humanity centered pilgrimmage that accomplished several goals at once.

I was talking to a person who cannot be mentioned. I mentioned that a young man in Toastmasters reminded me of Wally Cox. I mentioned it because we are all great fans of Wally Cox here. Then I said that it took me listening to Bob three times before I was able to make the connection. Bob has sly intelligence, humor, a message to deliver, and it seemed to me that he needed to bring that Wally Cox nature more to the fore. As a public speaker, you rarely get more than one occasion to have your audience "get" you. Bob lost a speaking contest recently not just because two of the other speakers were more "in your face" than he was, but because the Wally Cox quality wasn't dynamic enough for the judges to understand what he was doing.

I was treated to a tirade about what it means to be a misfit. And how lucky I was that I had presence and a persona. I countered that I was also a misfit. That the so-called presence (size 22) and its attendant stereotype was not one that I wanted, and that the persona was developed as armor to shield me from a sometimes nasty world. The persona did not bring me closer to people; on the contrary, it is generally a warning to people that if they are going to underestimate me, or mis-estimate me, they are in for a huge surprise.

Well, anyway, Happy Easter!